


just say you won't let go

by sifuamelia



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Childhood Friends, Developing Relationship, Eventual Fluff, Growing Up Together, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Pre-Canon, Speculation, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 18:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16224920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sifuamelia/pseuds/sifuamelia
Summary: "Sometimes, you’re five years-old, and you’ve begun to realize that some things are more permanent than others."(Marcos and Soren grow up together.)





	just say you won't let go

Sometimes, you’re five years-old, and you’ve begun to realize that some things are more permanent than others.

You stand next to your mother, who’s wearing black. In fact, _everybody’s_ wearing black. You’re wearing black, too, although you aren’t quite sure of what the memo was. You just know that your hand-me-down black pants are a little too big at the cuffs, dragging over the echoing stone floors as if they were sewn with the sole purpose of tripping you up and sending you sprawling, and that the storm-black sky crashing outside of the grand windows of the grand chapel is an unsettlingly strange one for this time of year…

…and that for the very first time in your very young life, you know the name of a pallid face beneath the frosted glass window of a coffin. Frozen. Lifeless.

The word _forever_ suddenly springs to the forefront of your uncomfortable mind.

Viren is the High Mage. The right hand to your king. You don’t know much else about him, save the fact that your parents don’t always spare him the kindest of terms when they talk low over the kitchen fire, when they think that you’re sound asleep in your bed. Your father is the captain of the Crownguard — your hero. Your mother forges his soldiers’ weapons — just as heroic. They both speak kindly of _Harrow_. They both live to serve the kingdom’s beloved ruler.

And yet. Viren.

You eye him, up there, where he stands like a statue (also swathed in blackness) next to that horrible coffin laid out in bloodless winter roses. Maybe your parents just don’t like magic like Viren does. Viren knows _lots_ of magic, although that’s probably to be expected. He’s the _High_ Mage. That _clearly_ makes him the best—

“Marcos!” your mother grits, the four rough fingers of her left hand tugging at your ear — possibly all of you that’s within her reach right now, what with the way that the entirety of Katolis is packed into the pews, like a can full of sardines fresh from the Great Sea. “Bow!”

You snap to attention, and you do as you’re told, bending to the hollow tune of a mournful psalm that you’re just beginning to understand the words to.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you’re at the armory, waiting around in the brisk twilight draped overhead, outside its heavy doors, for your mother to finish her day’s work.

You’re bored, and you aimlessly kick at a loose stone shallowly wedged in the damp dirt path—

—only for it to be kicked right back at you.

Unlike your boots — which are scuffed-up with all kinds of soot and beginning to pinch at your two big toes — the kicker’s boots are fine, made of a kind of leather that you’ve never seen before (and even at age five, you know your leathers — because of your mother’s work, you know your way around the palace smithy like you know the back of your hand). You stare at those boots for a second too long to be polite (and you know this because your father believes _very_ firmly in good manners) before you look up into the face of none other than Lord Viren’s son.

Soren is five, just like you, but he’s smaller. For some reason, you like that about him. Truth be told, you don’t know much else about him, although you _do_ know about his family. Viren, Claudia (even smaller), and—

“Do you like kickball?” he asks. Surprisingly eager. Shockingly earnest. He has floppy hair the color of the woodmouse that you sometimes sneak scraps of food to beneath the rough-hewn beams of your parents’ dinner table, and he has to push it out of his eyes as he speaks.

You regard him with a certain degree of suspicion. Politeness may be your father’s religion, but your mother has always told you that you mustn’t talk to strangers.

“I like kickball,” Soren says. “I think we should play together.”

Slowly, you nod. Whether or not it’s because you like kickball (you do), want to be polite (your father would be so proud), or know that this boy isn’t really much of a stranger at all (your mother would understand)… that can be left to the jury.

Sometimes, you’re five years-old, and sometimes, things are heartbreakingly simple. And although you don’t think much of it right now, your future best friend’s eyes are awfully, _awfully_ blue.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you’re eight years-old, and you have a really, _really_ , terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

You’ve accidentally shattered a newly-forged sword from the armory, your father chews you out for it in front of pretty much everybody that you know (including that crybaby step-prince, the one brought to the palace from the borderlands, instead of being born inside of it), and when you make the (perfectly reasonable) point that maybe, _just_ maybe, the _forger_ of the sword — not you — is the one to blame for its brittle weakness—

“Get out of my sight, Marcos,” your father hisses, face redder than the forge's flames burning all around you. Whether it's out of his anger at you, or of his embarrassment for the king's newly (and hastily) appointed smith, the lumpy man with marble-like eyes and no chin, the man that now squats shapelessly in what was once your mother's chair...

You take your father's advice.

You run, and you run, and you _run_ , up flights of stairs and through twisting alleys, across the many walls and catwalks that make up the castle’s upper levels... until your legs give out below you _,_ and you stumble, and you fall to the unforgiving ground of the stony parapet at the westernmost corner of the palace. You were going to fall anyway, what with the way that you’ve started crying. _Sobbing_ , even, fat tears running races down your dusty cheeks, your entire being shaking to its very core. Not all that conducive to running.

 _Crybaby._ You’re more than ashamed… but it’s not just because of your tears.

And you’re up there on that parapet for a good long while, long enough that the sun has begun to fade overhead, bowing to the summer moon as it reaches the beginning of its arc beneath the blazing clouds. The entire sky looks like it’s on fire, just like the forge, and then, suddenly, you’re thinking of _them_ — Sunfire elves.

You know that elves are just bedtime stories, just like that faraway place that they hail from — supposed monsters from a supposedly monstrous land, from where any goodness was driven long ago — but your mother had always spoken reverently of them, almost in awe. Their armor is forged in sun, stronger than anything that a Katolian smith could ever hope to offer... even a smith as expert as your mother had once been.

You know with all of your heart that she would’ve _loved_ to have seen such a thing, however forbidden that kind of love would be—

“Marcos?”

By now, you’d know that voice anywhere. On a crowded street, in a bustling marketplace, atop a stony parapet with an evening wind beginning to nip at your ears and nose.

You bury your tear-stained face in your dirty elbows. “G-Go away,” you mumble. It comes out not unlike a glow toad’s forlorn croak.

“Marc—“

“Go. _Away_.”

Of course, Soren doesn’t listen. He’s never been particularly good at that. “I brought you some apples,” he prods. As if _that’s_ enough to fix things.

You ignore all attempts at fixing and ask one of your dirty elbows, “H-How’d you even f-find me?”

“Been working on my tracking skills,” he says promptly around a crisp bite of apple. He’s _always_ eating them — he spends _way_ too much time around the horses these days, making off with their snacks, much to your father’s consternation. “Gotta get ready for big game season—“

“I d-didn’t — I didn’t know C-Claudia changed her name to ‘tracking skills.’”

“Dangit, Marcos!” Caught in his own game, Soren sighs heavily, so much so that it comes off with a bit of a tea kettle whistle at the tail end. It’s enough to make you startle, to look up, to even giggle through all of your unbecoming blubbering.

Your best friend stares at you with a face framed by sunset fire. And for a moment, it’s as if you’re both suspended in time. An everlasting moment, something infinite, uninterrupted by even the guards stalking their turret patrols below, the clanking noises of their burnished armor seemingly millions of billions of zillions of kilometers away from you and the boy sitting cross-legged in front of you.

Suddenly, he reaches out, and it's like you've forgotten how to breathe. All that you know is that weird little half-smile that he’s wearing, and those blue, _blue_ eyes—

Before you even realize what’s happening, he’s popped your snot bubble all over your face. Some of it even gums up your eyebrows. You nearly push him off of the parapet for it, wrestling him into the ground while hollering every single insult that your eight year-old brain can think up at his laughing mouth.

Anything to mask the roar of your heart in your ears, a rapid-fire beat that you’re still too young to put a name to.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you’re twelve years-old, and King Harrow decides that it’s a good day for the watering hole.

The temperatures outside have climbed high enough that even at mid-morning, there’s a heat haze shimmering off of the central plaza in front of you. Everybody’s hiding inside, in the cool stone hallways of the inner palace. Everybody except for you and Soren, that is — you’re lying beneath the deep shade of the gnarled and twisting oak at the edge of the yard, a book that you’ve long forgotten splayed out on your shirtless chest, as you watch the other boy lazily lob pure sugar cubes in the direction of a few of the Crownguard’s sweating horses.

He’s just sunk one neatly into a pair of startled buckteeth… when something tickles at your nose. Naturally, you sneeze directly into it.

“ _Ew_ , Marcos!” Claudia exclaims, falling back from where she'd been looming over you and frantically tugging on her long mane of silky hair. She’s recently taken to dying the ends purple, and her father is less than pleased by it. “Gross!”

Soren abandons his stack of sugar cubes and leans back on his browning elbows, quirking an eyebrow — the one still healing over from a tumble out of the very tree stretching above you — at his younger sister. “You asked for it, Claud. Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

Claudia rolls her eyes so hard that you’re pretty sure that she can see the back of her skull. Her eyes are big and green... just like her mother’s had once been. Eyes now frozen in time behind a sheet of frosted glass.

You desperately try to swallow the lump in your throat as she says, all sniffy, completely impervious to your dark, _dark_ thoughts: “Dad and King Harrow wanna take us down to the watering hole!”

“Who’s… ‘us?’” Soren asks slowly. Carefully. And the lump only grows, because is he _actually_ sticking his neck out on your behalf—!

“Me, you, Callum, Ezran, Ezran’s weird toad thingy — oh, and you, too, Marcos. Duh.” She grins at you, her smile wide and shining, although you can just make out a bit of something brown and gooey wedged between two of her teeth. Peanut butter — everybody has their vices, you guess.

“Hells _yeah_ , I’m coming!” Soren crows, up in a flash.

You’re a little more reserved in your stature as you get to your feet, but you offer her a hesitant grin of your own. “Thanks, Claudia,” you say, and you really, _truly_ mean it. “Sorry ‘bout your hair.”

“It’ll wash out in the lake,” she declares confidently, tapping at the side of her nose as she does so, the way that she _always_ does so when she’s got a good idea. “Now, c’m _on_ , already! My skin’s turning pinker than persimmon jam out here!”

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you watch your friends with their families, and you wonder what it’s like to have one.

To _really_ have one, beyond a father who lost his other half to the war, but seems to have forgotten that _you’re_ still here with him, that he still has a life besides the rush of the battlefield on the Breach. You know that Lord Viren has his moments of great distance, too, especially now that Lady Leonor’s been gone for almost seven years, but you know that Soren and Claudia will always have each other. And the princes… _Well_.

Callum’s currently riding around atop the king’s broad shoulders, looking halfway between happy and horrified (although that’s kind of just his face in general, you’ve noticed) — Claudia’s chanting very loudly at Harrow to throw him off and into the shallows. On the edge of the lake, Queen Sarai sits with her feet cooling off in the water, feeding her younger son an afternoon snack. Ezran’s glow toad squats atop her head like a very ugly hat, and Viren, who’s there beside her with a jelly tart halfway into his mouth, seems utterly captivated by him. Like they're having a staring contest, or something.

Or maybe he’s just taking advantage of being on Sarai’s good side. At least, for _now_ , anyway — Sarai’s younger sister is also stationed at the Breach, and when your father comes home (an incredibly rare occurrence these days, now that he no longer rides with the Crownguard), he tends to agree with Captain Amaya’s various insights on the palace’s _many_ politics.

You swing your legs over the diving dock, your feet dangling in the water. From this far away, out toward the middle of the lagoon, their words are indecipherable, but you can still make out the smiles on their faces. You close your eyes against it all…

…and for a moment, you pretend. That your father’s up on the shore with the queen and the mage, amiably discussing which scones are in season. That your mother’s just below you, having swum out beside you, now treading water, wet hair plastered to the side of her smiling face, telling you that it’s alright, there’s nothing to be afraid of, just jump, I’m right here to catch you—

You don’t jump so much as plummet when hands suddenly make contact with your slick back and _push_. Your foot catches on the diving dock’s ladder as you fall, and down there, in the murky dark of the watering hole’s deepest point, you float for a seemingly endless second, suspended, _paralyzed_ —

Two hands grab at your underarms and roughly tug you back up and onto the little dock. Its wet surface nearly sends you spinning all over again. You cough up a nice glob of something brine-y, and then pant, so hard that it _hurts_ , trying to clear your mucked-up lungs, settle your fuzzy head, still your racing heart—

“Marcos, Marc, are you — are you okay? Dude, I’m so — I’m _so_ sorry, I didn’t—!“

You glare at Soren, who’s sitting on his heels in front of you, his hand hovering over your forearm, but ultimately foregoing any kind of reassuring touch. A rare display on his part of knowing better. You might’ve clapped for him… if you weren’t so goddamn _pissed_.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, a little more quietly this time. His eyes are huge and pleading. Sometimes, in moments of sheer panic, just like this one, you find that you rather hate those eyes.

You flop back onto the deck with a _slap_. “Apology _un_ accepted,” you say crossly. Or, rather, _wheeze_ crossly. Because _man_ , does your foot hurt. You can already feel a bruise forming — you try rolling your ankle, a tentative stretch… but that only makes things worse. You wince audibly at the pain.

“Did I — Did I break your foot?”

“Probably,” you deadpan, staring up at the sky in what you hope appears to be a woe-is-me fashion. The sun has finally disappeared from your field of vision, thank the gods. You’ve never loved the all-encompassing heat of Katolian summers.

“Rocks,” Soren curses, and you almost laugh, because the way that he says it is still as if he’s trying it, testing it. He isn’t very good at cursing. Maybe someday, though — he wants to be a Crownguard so badly, now, and you hear the king's soldiers cursing all of the time.

“How’re you gonna get back to shore?” he asks, apprehension coloring his tone.

“You’ll just have to carry me,” you say, almost sweetly. But then, you instantly regret it. Because it just sounds so—

“I _definitely_ could.”

You breathe out a breath that you didn’t know that you’d been holding. “With all those big, strong muscles of yours,” you joke... but not really.

“So big. So strong.” And you know him well enough to notice the absence of any bragging note in his voice. He’s just playing along with you, through and through.

You wheeze again, but this time, it’s out of humor. “My foot’s not really broken,” you admit.

“Oh. Phew.” Soren flops back beside you. “Your dad would’ve killed me.”

“No need for carrying,” you affirm, with a Claudia-worthy roll of your eyes at his sense of self-preservation.

“I still could, though. Like. If I — uh. If _you_  wanted.”

Slowly but surely, you turn your head to face him. He looks right back at you, unblinking. You wonder offhandedly if you’re imagining the way in which the tips of his ears have gone just a little bit pink… but you decide that it’s probably just sunburn.

“I’ll remember that,” is what you end up responding with. It makes absolutely zero sense.

And that night, as you’re on the brink of falling asleep, you almost wish that you’d drowned while you still had the chance.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you’re sixteen years-old, on the edge of seventeen, and it’s the ten-year anniversary of your best friend’s mother’s death.

But said best friend is nowhere to be found. He even skips the memorial, the flower-laying, the mourning psalms over the funereal fires. And as you wander off from the subsequent luncheon, absentmindedly munching on a crisp red apple, you wonder if Lord Viren even noticed that his son was missing.

 _Some things are more permanent than others,_ you think to yourself as you kick at a loose stone just outside of the chapel. It _pings_ off of a sewer grate... then skitters right back to you.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you find your best friend in the pantry long, _long_ after the kitchens have shuttered for the night.

He’s always been prone to stealing jelly tarts, which Claudia _never_ approves of ("Think of all the carbs!"), but you still eagerly join in on any kind of food thieving opportunities made available to you. Staying in shape for the Crownguard isn’t all that hard when you’ve got the metabolism of a teenage boy. Because you _are_ a teenage boy.

But this time’s different. Soren hasn’t gotten into the tarts, or the scones, or even the biscuits (hard enough on the teeth to be considered weapons-grade). No. _This_ time—

“You found me,” he drawls, dragging on the syllables, looking up at you with those stupidly blue eyes of his. They’re a little too glassy for comfort. “You fucking _found_ me.”

“And I didn’t even have to ask your sister for help,” you say, taking a stab at humor, although the occasion calls for anything but. You lean down to pluck the whisky tankard from his outstretched hand, wincing at how light it is... and how goddamn awful his breath smells.

“ _You_ don’t need Claudia,” Soren slurs. “You _never_ do.”

You sigh, setting the tankard down on the highest shelf that you can reach. Too bad that he’s caught up to (and admittedly, surpassed) you in height, although you’re pretty sure that he doesn’t exactly have the kind of hand-eye coordination right now necessary to get back into it and keep on drinking.

“Her magic’s helpful, from time to time,” you say carefully.

Soren snorts, loud and ugly. Long gone are the days in which magic was his fascination — you’ve grown to a silent understanding that he doesn’t exactly trust his family’s powers anymore. Not after what he watched his father do at the Breach last month… and seen all of the misfortune that’s already come down on Katolis with it.

The border war has always been, that much you’ve always known. It took Lady Leonor. It took Queen Sarai. It took your mother, it took your father. Now you know that it could take you, too, as easily as snapping one of Claudia’s beloved peanuts in two. But you aren’t half as worried about yourself as you’re worried about—

“But _you_ don’t need magic to find me.”

 _This conversation is going in circles,_ you think. _**Dangerous** circles_. You try to safely reroute it with, “Let’s get you to bed.”

The other boy grins. It catches in your throat, just like it always does. Always has. Always will.

“Only if you’re coming with me,” he says, and his crooked eyebrow winks at you.

You take a deep, _deep_ breath. “I’ll help you up there,” you amend for him, through gritted teeth.

Soren doesn’t need any further permission. “My hero,” he murmurs… and then, he falls straight into your arms.

You’re practically dragging him up the tower’s spiral staircase as he begins to snore, drool dribbling down his chin and collecting in the heat-mottled hollow of his throat that you refuse to make any semblance of eye contact with.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you’re up way too late and way too past your near-nonexistent pay grade, tucking your kingdom’s High Mage’s son into his messy bed in his equally messy bedroom.

Everything in here’s beyond messy, actually — a veritable disaster, as if one of Claudia’s wind spells had whipped its way through and torn everything to pieces in its wake. But even _you_ aren’t invincible to this disastrous nature of his, either.

Because seeing Soren like this, propped up against his many pillows, his slack face unguarded, vulnerable, even, just like it used to be, when you were children playing kickball out in the yard and horsing around at the watering hole, and stealing jelly tarts from the royal baker and pulling pranks on Claudia and Callum, and anything and everything in between—

You shake your head as if to clear your thoughts. It doesn’t work at all, but it’ll have to do, you decide as you pull Soren’s quilt tight over his shoulders, then turn on your heel—

“Where’re you goin?’” you hear him mumble from behind you.

You freeze in the doorway, but you don’t spin around. Anything to keep him from catching a glimpse of the heat that’s currently flooding your face. “Home,” you say truthfully.

He says nothing in response for a long, _long_ moment, and it’s as if you can feel the entire room holding its breath alongside you—

“Marc,” he says.

“Y-Yeah?”

“Stay here. With… With me.” You hear him swallow. “I don’t… I don’t want you to go.”

Oh, how you wish, almost violently so, that you were _strong_. Strong enough to tear out your heart and dash it to the unforgiving ground, and stomp on it till you kill off every single feeling that it’s ever tried to feel. Strong enough to resist teetering on the brink of what’s right here in front of you. Strong enough to turn around and walk away from something so goddamn heartbreakingly simple.

For all of your Crownguard training, you’ve never been a single ounce prepared to face down a danger like this one.

“You…” Your voice wobbles precariously. “You’re drunk, Soren.”

“…So?”

“You’re drunk, and you’re sad, and you don’t… You don’t know what you’re saying—“

“But I know how I _feel_ ,” he interrupts, and it’s so plain, so simple… You just have to turn around and face him.

“And I know — I _know_ — you feel it, too. Marcos.”

Surprisingly eager. Shockingly earnest. He reaches up to push his hair out of his eyes...

...but you're already there to do it for him.

 

* * *

 

You never really stood a chance, did you?

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, you’re eighteen years-old, and things outside have gone from bad to worse. But right here, right now, in this very moment… they’re doing pretty alright.

“Where’re you goin?’” you hear him mumble from behind you.

You don’t turn around from his whirlwind of a wardrobe as you hastily pull on one of his many rumpled shirts. “I’ve g-got forest patrol,” you yawn, voice cracking slightly, rusty with disuse in the _very_ early hour. “M-Morning shift.”

“I’ll come with you,” he says immediately.

“ _No_ way.” You start lacing up one of your riding boots — you aren’t quite sure of where the other one went, kicked to the side so forcefully last night. Maybe it ended up under his bed? “You’ll just distract me.”

Even without turning around to look at him, you can perfectly picture the shit-eating grin worming its way across his stupid, _stupid_ face. “You know you love it,” he says, sing-song.

“Not doing my job properly because some idiot keeps trying to mack on my neck?” You shake your head. “Yeah, it’s my absolute favorite.”

“Your sarcasm’s unappreciated,” he says, faking a sniffle. In the distance, thunder rumbles lowly.

“So are your hickeys,” you retort.

“You wound me!” he exclaims dramatically, falling back into the pillows with an exaggerated _thump_.

You turn around, partially to look for your other boot, but mostly to look at Soren. He never put his nightshirt back on, and when you take him in, there, nearly golden beneath the dim glow of his bedside lamp, you’re suddenly seized with the uncontrollable desire to just stay here and lay here, curled up against his chest, forever and ever and _ever_.

You sigh heavily, rubbing at the back of your warm neck. _This wasn’t supposed to happen,_ you think mulishly. But then again... everybody has their vices.

“Hey,” you say.

“Hey,” he says back.

“I love you,” you say.

He smiles at you, softer than anything, and you sit down on the edge of his bed to cup his cheek so that you can feel him say it back: “I love you, too.”

You lean down and kiss him. Heartbreakingly simple, even in the face of bad morning breath and a day’s worth of scratchy stubble.

“Be safe out there,” he murmurs into your mouth.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” you reassure him, and with complete confidence, too, because it’s just another forest patrol. It’s not like you’re out on the Breach serving under Amaya (she’s a general, now — things change very quickly these days). Nothing of note ever happens on an o’dark-thirty-in-the-morning forest patrol.

You pull on your other boot, and then your rain gear, and you kiss him one last time.

And then you tear yourself away. And you go.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, it’s under an hour later, under an hour since you left that safe little haven of a circle of arms that were made just for you... and you’re backed into a puddle of mud by one of _them_.

A monster, from a monstrous land, with wicked swords crossed just below your chin, barely biting into the skin of your throat. But as you stare upward, into the strange purple eyes of what you've always heard to be certain death…

…you find that you still aren’t worried about yourself.

**Author's Note:**

> It's okay, Rayla doesn't kill him! My sweet knife girl wouldn't *actually* hurt anybody. Probably. (T⌓T)


End file.
